Sanford Celeryfeds

The Sanford Celeryfeds owned one of the great nicknames in baseball history, and it was no joke: Sanford was the celery capital of Florida, the team name honored the growers who built the town, and the uniforms carried a logo of celery stalks.

The Celeryfeds were charter members of central Florida's new professional league in 1919 and played straight into its first controversy, a championship series against Orlando that dissolved into protests over Orlando's pitcher allegedly throwing the banned "shine ball." Games were thrown out, the series was ruled a 3-3 tie, and both clubs were declared co-champions of the league's first season. Sanford's Stuffy Stewart led the league with 63 runs scored that year on his way to a big league career.

The Celeryfeds won a cleaner title in 1926, going 70-35 under manager Lee Crowe to finish first outright. Sanford kept fielding teams at Memorial Stadium for decades under a parade of names, including the Lookouts of 1936-39; the 1939 Sanford club was later named one of the 100 greatest minor league teams of all time. The Celeryfeds name itself returned for a final bow in 1946.

The Celeryfeds' league began play in 1919 as a Class D circuit of six teams clustered across central Florida, tracing what would later become the I-4 corridor decades before the interstate existed. The circuit ran through 1928, went dark during the Depression, returned in 1936, paused again for World War II, and resumed in 1946. Unlike most minor leagues of the era, it never truly died; the same circuit still operates across Florida today.